“Working up to divorce number two. Coming up to fifty. Looking for the meaning of life.”
“Stop lookin’. It’ll bite you on the ass when you least expect it.”
Jack laughed.
“Anyhow,” Henry said, “don’t go getting het up about fifty. Nothing wrong with fifty except how fast sixty races after it.” He sipped his drink. “And you don’t even want to know about seventy and eighty,” he said. “Those bastards come at you from behind.”
They both laughed then.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been out more since…” Jack hesitated and took a sip of his own drink, an occasion-inspired Campari and soda, reminded again of his recent lack of charity.
“Since Suzanna died,” Henry finished.
“Since Suzanna died,” Jack echoed.
“Well, without Suzanna, I’m not so colorful.”
“Aren’t you?” Jack asked seriously.
“Nope. Thinner, too.”
“She was the best cook I ever knew.”
“She said that about you.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Henry was wearing his customary tweed jacket and maroon bow tie. He looked at Jack, not like a father might, but maybe like one of those wise college professors you tend to remember romantically when you graduate. “So how come you’re not cooking today? I was kinda hoping for an invitation. In fact, the only reason I accepted this one, apart from the fact that it saved me from flying out to my daughter’s house to get treated like a geriatric for three days, was to see you and ask you to cook a fillet of beef for Christmas.”
“I’m cooking a bit less these days, Henry,” Jack said. “I think I cook like other people drink—to forget.”
“Bullshit,” Henry said. “Some woman is selling you a pile.”
“Henry, you’re the second person in as many months who’s accused me of being unable to think without a woman’s influence.”
“Not unable, Jack, unwilling.”
Beyond them Lisa giggled. Jack shuddered involuntarily.
“Why would you say that? I think of myself as kind of a man’s man type.”
“Yeah, well, over fifty that’s nonsense. When men say that stuff, it just means that they do what women tell ’em to do like any other schmuck, but then they make women cry and kid themselves that they’re heroes. Luckily, intelligent men, if they’re heterosexual—two camps in which I put you firmly—get over the idea eventually that they’re independent of women. It took me a long time to figure out that I needed Suzanna and that I didn’t wanna make her cry anymore.”
“I’m surprised that you ever made Suzanna cry. You were the happiest couple I ever met.”
“Maybe it was the cooking.”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t quit cooking, Jack, and don’t give up on the idea that a good woman, the right woman, isn’t out there for you. Too many men your age shack up with some bland jellyfish, or worse, a nurse, just because they’re scared. They’re scared of rattling ’round on their own with egg on their ties waiting for the mailman to find ’em dead on the doorstep after they’ve tried to pee in the open some frosty night. Jack, if you don’t find the right woman, live alone and write and cook a lot. That’s what you’re good at, and in the end it’s the stuff you’re good at that brings you joy, lets you be yourself. I’m a helluvan old man, Jack, and I know. Now invite me over for Christmas and go get me another drink. And watch out for that one with the teeth and the little Lolita in tow. She’ll have you in irons before you can say alimony.”
The next day Jack got up late. The sea and the sky were merged and steely, and there was a heavy frost. He lit a fire and put on some music. Then, in a kitchen unencumbered by pretension or waste, he sliced six onions and put them into a heavy skillet in some melted butter on a low heat. Conscious of the pleasant sensation of sighing contentment—Jack found the process of caramelizing onions as warming as a hot bath—he left the pan and the butter to do their work and went back to the fire and sat down with a book.
It was a slim, fashionable, contemporary novel—a present from Adrienne. She had sent it, courier-delivered, with a note. “Jack, you must read this. Adrienne.” You must. If Jack had raised an eyebrow at the emphasis, he had lowered it again deliberately. Okay, he would.
He sat with a glass of Pernod and propped his moccasined feet on the worn needlepoint of his favorite footstool. The scent of onions drifted to him and he let the sweet aroma fill him up. The fire was making the homely noises that fires make and the strains of a familiar pianist wandered, massing and thinning, across the room from the speaker in the corner. He opened Adrienne’s gift cautiously, as if turning over a rock, and then split the spine slightly with his thumb, so that he could read with one hand.
By the time Jack had read five pages, he was wondering what he could say to Adrienne. She had called to make sure that the book had arrived and was clearly intent on discussing its contents with him. He read five more pages. Then he got up and went and stirred the onions a couple of times with a wooden spatula, though there was no need. Then he went back to the book for the third time, lifting it and looking at it the way an old man looks at his watch. He skimmed a few more pages. By this time his lack of interest was intense enough to start to bite into the pleasure of the smell of onions.
He closed the book, stared at the cover for a moment—a beautiful image of a leaf outlined in black—and then he got up and walked back into the kitchen. He flipped the lid of the garbage can with his foot and dropped the book into it. Then he drained his Pernod.
Staring out at the flat horizon and the pinches of sugary frost that dressed the fringes of the November landscape, Jack knew that a lack of bad habits was not going to be enough to sustain his relationship with Adrienne. And he also knew, with no escape from the knowing, that that was pretty much what the thing came down to. She had no obvious demerits, and he was on his best behavior. But one of these nights soon, he was gonna want to go and eat a good steak and talk about oysters, or lay up with a little trash fiction while she was around, and although he knew that Adrienne would not complain or argue about these things, might even give him a quiet sort of permission to pursue them, that would not be enough. The air between them would be permanently dangerous, prickly with compromise. The negotiation would exhaust both of them. It wasn’t worth it. He was going to have to face up to true bachelorhood. Not this playing at bachelorhood thing. The real deal. He was going to have to be alone with himself and see if they got on.
He tossed some thyme into the onions, cracked three eggs into a bowl, and added cream and salt and pepper.
Eve made the bed as precisely as she did everything else, and drew the same sense of pleasure from its smoothed surface as she did from the rows of preserves labeled and dated in the pantry. She was feeling terribly, unaccustomedly content; she had the weekend to herself. She had enjoyed the visits from Ollie and Izzy, so much more frequent lately, but quiet had always been restorative to Eve. The thought of a whole weekend alone in a well-stocked house, with just a book and a fire for company, made her feel calm, protected from sudden eddies. Despite her progress, she still needed these havens.
She went downstairs and made herself a second pot of tea and some toast, which she buttered while the tea brewed on the Aga edge. She spread the toast with some of last year’s bramble jelly and cut it diagonally and put it on a porcelain plate that matched the teapot and her cup and saucer. It was her favorite china—exotic little birds frolicked across it, their ebullient pink and orange plumage subdued by serene greens.
She put the breakfast things on a tray and took the tray into the library, where she had already lit the fire. She poured herself some tea and sat down and opened her book. One of Jack’s. She still thought of reading in the morning as an indulgence, but Beth had taught her to allow herself a few of these.
Outside, it was a heavy day, drizzly with low clouds. She got up and switched on an extra lamp and then she put on s
ome music. And then at 9:38 a.m. on a wet Saturday morning in November, Eve Petworth, dressed in a knee-length wool skirt and a camel cashmere sweater, held her arms out to an imaginary lover and, slowly and prettily, her light feet skimming the Turkish rug as if it were parquet, closed her eyes and danced.
Jack awoke at 4:44. He got up and got himself a glass of water from the bathroom faucet and drank it. He went back to bed, but sleep eluded him. He lay for a while letting his eyes adjust to the dark and staring at an empty picture hook next to the bedroom door, Marnie had removed a photograph from it and Jack had never refilled the space. The empty hook, imbued with the dolefulness of the hour, took on a cumbersome significance that engulfed him briefly and then condensed, concentrating itself into a physical discomfort in his chest. He sat up and the discomfort settled a bit, but then intensified again, quickened by the lack of daylight. He got up and walked around for a bit, pressing at his sternum and willing it to ease. Heartburn. He went back to the bathroom and took some Alka-Seltzer. Then he went back to bed again at 5:15.
It was no good.
He sat up and switched on the light and then he got up and put on a plaid robe and went downstairs and fixed himself some coffee and looked at the dark windows and felt blue. He wasn’t sick and he wasn’t broke, and when he finished it with Adrienne, as he knew he would, he would no longer be able to blame a single one of his run-of-the-mill inadequacies on anyone else. If he took Henry’s advice and just headed into old age, or crossed its threshold anyhow, alone, he was gonna have to take responsibility for everything. Everything. Damn, he thought. Here it is at last. Adulthood.
Sometimes I wake up at night, and when I do, I like milk and cookies. I’m not sure that’s a thing in your neck of the woods. I’ve seen those well-acted, low-budget British movies and no one is ever getting up in the middle of the night and fixing milk and cookies in them—a fault if you ask me. Maybe it’s to do with the financial constraints, or is it other British constraints? Anyhow, I got up tonight and dammit if there wasn’t a dearth of cookies. I made some. Peanut cookies. It was a recipe of my grandmother’s. I’m sending it to you, not just because I owe you a grandmother, but because I think this particular grandmother would have approved of your lavender scones. What am I saying—Approved? She’d have swooned. And the rose petal jam. She’d have invited every lady in the county over and rubbed their noses in it. An English recipe. She thought everything English smacked of class. I’m beginning to think she was right.
Jack
By the way, I always salt the peanuts a little after I roast them.
“What are you up to?”
“Not a lot, as it happens.”
“Well, I thought I’d come out…Jack?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Shall I come out?”
“I’m not…uh…”
“It was just an idea.”
“Maybe I’ll come in to see you instead.”
“Jack. Are you trying to break up with me?”
Adrienne had delivered this inquiry with an utter lack of hysteria. Why couldn’t he simply say yes? Jack thought. Because he was a coward. Because he wasn’t ready for the void that breaking off his relationship with her would leave. Because Adrienne would leave cleanly. He was sure of that; she wasn’t like other women. There’d be no 2:00 a.m. phone calls full of recriminations, no little telltale female flotsam left dotted about his house. She would go.
“I’m just busy, Adrienne. Nobody said anything about breaking anything off. I never understand why women have to dramatize the smallest adjustment in a plan.” Even as he said this, he knew it was grossly unfair. But he’d jumped already, so he kept jumping. “I wanna work. You’re the one who’s at me all the time to work.”
There was a moment’s silence, thick on his side with unacknowledged deceit. She cut right through it.
“Jack, if this relationship is not what you want, I’d rather you said so. I am certainly not interested in some clichéd breakup routine in a public place. That is the sort of thing immature men do to protect themselves from immature women’s hysteria. I hope, Jack, that neither of us fits into those categories.”
He could feel the accusation over the line, measured as it was. To leave an intelligent woman was a colder, more aware business than the cut-and-run kind of operation he’d fallen into these past few years. Care would be required for this new sort of departure. And then, in its wake, he would be left, not wallowing in murky, stale failure, but instead, spotlit by the clean, direct glare of accountability.
“Honey,” he said, “I’m just not in a frame of mind for socializing. I’ll see you on Thursday. We’ll talk then.”
“All right, Jack.”
“Thursday, then.”
“Thursday.”
Jack hung up, aware of the corner he had painted himself into.
I went to Italy for a honeymoon once. I say ‘for a honeymoon’ because in many ways I am detached from the whole experience, though it was, I can admit now, the happiest two weeks of my life. It was the first time I was aware of life, I suppose—of food, particularly. I had reached (this won’t shock you, I suspect) the point in pregnancy when hunger becomes overwhelming and the weeks of nausea and dread are suddenly replaced by the grateful embrace of gluttony.
And love. There was that, too.
Afterwards, when it had all gone—my buoyant roundness and openness to joy—when it had been stripped away, I tried to forget everything: the sunshine on my arms, the breeze through the vines, the music that was playing on the terrace in the spectacular restaurant where I first tasted what sage could do to butter. And in many ways, for many years, I managed it.
Then, reading your book—that first one, ‘Dead Letters,’ that I wrote to you about, that scene with the peach—it all came back. But it came from a different source; a safer, more entertaining source than my own needling memory. And I was so grateful—for a moment of deep pleasure, felt with no accompanying torment. That was why I wrote. Although, if I’d waited another day, I probably wouldn’t have. Haste—fatal to risotto—has served me.
Your friend,
Eve
Jack lay the featherweight of Eve’s writing paper in his lap and spread a palm across it, protecting the bare confession in those ingenuous, poignant words; as lovely and moving as light through stained glass, and thought, it is me that your moment of haste has served, Eve, me.
“I’m not going to let you do this, Jack.”
“Do what exactly?” Jack leaned against the countertop in Adrienne’s kitchen. A kitchen that had only ever been used for cooking by Jack, and then in the most limited way.
“Sabotage yourself.”
“Sabotage myself.”
“Stop repeating what I say. You know what I mean.” She took a sip of her wine, unruffled. That trait in itself held a great deal of appeal for Jack. An appeal he was trying not to give in to. He had come into the city and booked himself into a hotel and tried to get Adrienne to meet him somewhere, but she had insisted he come to her apartment. He drank, too, feeling defeated.
“You’re sabotaging yourself and looking around you for some external problem. You’re trying to find some outside source of your difficulties, but there isn’t one, Jack.”
Jack sighed. “Adrienne, you may be right. In fact, I strongly suspect that you are right, but it doesn’t change the fact that I need to…”
“That’s the trouble, isn’t it? You don’t know what you need to do. But I know, Jack. You need to write. You need to write something real. You can stop protesting about this. I know it. I know you want to write something that you’re genuinely proud of. That’s all I’ve tried to do, Jack. Help you to write.”
She stood then and put one of those perfect hands of hers on his chest and looked into his eyes. It was a gesture more deeply loving than any she had proffered the length of their relationship. Her hand was warm through his shirt; desire rose up in him like a cobra to music. He took her shoulders firmly in his two hands and g
ently stepped her backward before he could act on it.
She understood.
“Have it your way, Jack,” she said.
It was late and he was hungry. He walked through the city feeling the bite of early December through his overcoat. The build to Christmas was starting in earnest and the streets were thick with holiday crowds. There were white lights on the trees and gold decorations in the store windows and little gangs of cheerful people choking the pavements, dressed for nights out.
Jack decided to go and eat, and to try not to think. He walked down to Lucio’s. On the way he gave a fifty-dollar bill to a guy in a doorway, who looked at him as suspiciously as he looked at the bill, before he shrugged and tucked the cash inside the oversized, military great coat he was wearing and grinned. It was a crazy grin, maniacal. He tipped an imaginary hat at Jack, and Jack was grateful for a whimsical moment in an otherwise leaden day.
“What is it that you want, Jack?”
“More bread.”
“Always with the smart answers.”
“You sound like Suzanna, Henry.”
“Yeah, well. That happens.”
“It never happened to me.”
“Maybe you never wanted it to.”
Henry’s house had an even better view than Jack’s. And more books and more paintings. It was the house of an old man who had read a lot, listened to a lot of music, and looked at a lot of nice pictures and seen a bit of life.
“I want it now. I wonder why I never looked for that kind of relationship from a woman. I always looked for women I couldn’t be friends with.”
“If it’s any consolation, I’ve noticed plenty of women doing the same thing.”
“Have you?”
“Sure. The ones who are as dumb as you are.”
Jack put a hand to his chin and lowered it again, laying it flat on the tablecloth and studying his fingertips. “I realize it’s kind of corny to have this sort of crisis around your fiftieth birthday,” he said. “But here I am, a walkin’ talkin’ cliché.”
That Part Was True Page 14
